Really great article and really great rebuttal of a horseshit argument from Responsible Statecraft. The only real problem here is that you are arguing with political hacks who have absolutely zero interest in listening to reason. They're there to push a partisan political position, not to openly and honestly debate the real nuances of foreign policy and military procurement processes.
As a man who has spent his entire adult life in the business of developing, manufacturing and selling munitions to the DOD, I can promise you that Joe Biden, for whatever else his faults may have been, did not "give away the farm"; that farm was long gone even when I first entered the defense industry back in 1999 😁.
I skimmed so I may have missed it: the bulk of what was sent to Ukraine was too old for DOD to use. Using Ukraine as the disposal mechanism likely created significant savings on the various obsolete systems shipped.
Hi Tina, the Pentagon's audit failures are genuinely scandalous and worth being angry about. The DoD has failed to pass a clean audit every single year since the audit requirement was mandated by Congress in 1990. To me, it represents a serious accountability gap in how taxpayer money gets tracked through one of the world's largest bureaucracies.
Personally, I think the audit failures are mostly a story about decades of incompatible accounting systems, siloed databases, and a bureaucratic culture that never prioritized financial transparency, not necessarily a coordinated skimming operation. But defense contractors absolutely profit from war, and the revolving door between the Pentagon and the defense industry is insane.
I wrote, three or four years ago, that the number one priority after arming Ukraine was rebuilding the factories.
Some have been built, mostly by the Ukrainians and the Germans, but others are lagging, including Norway's Nammo and Kongsberg Defence (the latter makes the NASAMS anti air missile - both are waiting for investment and electricity allotment, no kidding ), and Chemring Nobel who still don't even have planning permission for their new explosives factory.
The Americans are expanding far too slowly as well, Ukraine, Tűrkiye and China are cornering the cheap and good enough drone space.
Thank you for writing this piece, Wes! You are absolutely correct! Biden arming Ukraine didn't cause the problem we currently face! To insinuate it did is using slanted logic.
Our country is much less safe and we need to get off our behind and fix it. Using this faulty logic, one could just as easily write a piece arguing that the Iran war was the cause of the problem because we used up all of our high value ammunitions like Patriot and Tomahawk missiles, etc. in an illegal war!
You hit the nail right on the head! We did it to ourselves! Now we have to reap the whirlwind! We need to replenish our weapons. it's just that simple! Pointing Fingers for political gain is not going to do it!
Your perspective is a clear statement and analysis of what has been plainly apparent to a blind man at least since 2014. We have become the pre-War German Army and German arms industry (not at the same scale but with the same mindset). Let's build the most awesome tanks in the history of tanks, arm them to the teeth, armor them against everything but a lightning strike from Zeus, and, oh, by the way, let's build them like Swiss watches, one neat tank at a time. And let's make them hard to maintain, and fuel hogs, and let's use highly specialized, technically advanced ammunition. Should be fine.
*A few moments later* The Americans were turning out inferior tanks at the rate of 300 per day on assembly lines and swarming battlefields with half-assed tanks *Ha ha haaa!* except that swarms of mediocre tanks beat the hell out of one Swiss Army Tank, Tiger or not. Like swarms of drones.
The Iranians shot up a few of our most advanced aircraft on the ground with a handful of kites with gas motors and props carrying hand grenades. (This last bit was particularly galling because it was so reminiscent of Admiral Kimmel's and General Short's [both came up short, just like the best and brightest in the Iran fiasco] parking all the big boats and bombers in nice straight lines for security from theoretical, local, Japanese provocateurs.
It's as though our arms procurement mavens, and their industrial enablers, look at the current battlefield and say, "Oh, that's precious. Anyway, let's build a new drone that costs $25 million and can read a license plate from 30,000 feet. And let's build 20 of them." Should be fine.
Our MO is to wait until we're under immediate and direct attack across a broad front before we throw out the budget, order our industries to build anything that flies and explodes, suspend the procurement rules, and unleash the dogs of war. The situation I describe is what the AAF did in 1940. Congress told Hap Arnold, "Here's a billion dollars. Build an Air Force." There was no formal budget of any kind for the AAF's X Program until 1944 for the 1945 fiscal year when it became abundantly clear we would win the War.
We haven't gotten serious yet. Neither has Europe. Or the Commonwealth. Or anyone else, except Ukraine and Russia. So frustrating. Thanks for your excellent analysis. Slava Ukraine.
Ukraine has been given 39 ATACMS missiles, US Army fired 414 ATACMS missiles at Iraq in 2003. Ukraine has not received a single Tomahawk missiles, US Navy fired 802 Tomahawk missiles at Iraq in April-March 2003.
All those missiles were fired within 20 days then. At Iraq who never threatened or attacked USA, Canada, Europe, or any American allies in the Middle East.
If Kyiv falls, be sure to see Moscow (1) station nukes in western Ukraine and (2) will draft a million men from Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova into the Z-orcs army stationed on the Polish, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
---
David Sacks and Mike Lee were Putin's personal nuclear terrorists with one goal: deprive Ukraine of defences.
The "cost" of the Ukraine war depends on how you value stuff we pulled out of inventory that we were never, ever going to use again ourselves. Replacement cost? Original cost? Scrap value? I'm tending towards scrap value for a lot of it. In which case the cost of the war to the U.S. is, practically speaking, even lower.
On the concept of "Scrap Value": Some of that stuff couldn't have simply been scrapped out. It would have had to be decommissioned at additional cost to taxpayers. At least we got to see it blown up against an invading Russian army.
There is a historical detail that has led the US to the loss of manufacturing capacity that has never been mentioned. The Defence Production Act was enacted to maintain production and the readiness state of the US Military. About the time of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, or before that, the requirement to be able to reconstitute war time production in 120 days was dropped. That was the start of the end of US manufacturing. Or my memory of the information is getting fuzzy with age, but the outcome was that the US’s manufacturing ability even by 1980 was finished.
Former industrial parks where there were hundreds of factories cheek by jowl were abandoned, rusted and being demolished. Around Chicago, Detroit, and many other places the bells were tolling for the assembly lines, ship yards, foundries, machine shops and the jobs. The corporations had a free hand to move manufacturing the cheapest labour pools they could find: Mexico, then China, then Vietnam, etc…
The upshot is that business people are strategically myopic at best, and willfully ignorant at worst. They should not be running government’s strategy for defence or war.
European manufacturers have not seen quite the decimation, so for them to rebuild will be somewhat easier.
I will push back a little bit, the lack of manufacturing capacity lands squarely on Congress and the Presidents. Industry will not build or maintain capacity if is not paid for.
Yep. Surge capacity was a part of the supplier agreements at any good company I worked for. We'd try for 55/35/10 percent distribution with 3 suppliers. Each knew where they stood and had the opportunity to grow, shrink, or leave. Each supplier agreement included required planning for what they would do if we suddenly increased, or decreased, our demand. Consider a decrease in our order putting a supplier on the rocks; Thirty-five percent reduced to 10% and they go out of business (suddenly to 0%) would be a real shock. Enough to bring major lines to a grinding halt.
The war goods industry seems designed to make a ton of money for the suppliers and their stockholders and only secondarily "provide for the common defense". Well they made particular importance of the making money part and seem to have left the common defense part in the ditch.
Great piece, but what is unsaid is that it makes perfect sense if you are on team democracy. If you are trying to defend democracy and the rule of law in the United States and throughout the world, then the return was incredible. If you are trying to end democracy in the United States, and anywhere in the world — because democracy anywhere is a threat to despots, and aspiring despots, everywhere — like Trump and the party in his image, then what you say makes no sense at all. Why would you arm your enemy against your ally despot, Putin. And this is the true motivation of Mike Lee and his follower.
Another important point is that we will never be able to compete with China in mass arms production. They have four times the population, and are rapidly approaching us in GDP per capita. And in scientific and technological advancement, if we keep lurching backward towards the dark ages, they will quickly exceed us there too. Where we can beat the Chinese is if all of the world’s advanced democracies unite. Together, we have a comparable population and much more wealth and technology.
But Trump is a hideous excuse for a human being whose word means nothing. He has no true friends, and his party has been formed in his image. And, of course, they are on the other side of democracy.
Kasparov made an argument a while back that what makes America great is it's ability to reboot when faced with problems. I still believe that America can reboot and save her ideals.
I read an article a while back about CEOs in the 60s believing in the capitalist ideal. By this I mean competition and fair wages for the working class. Sadly, I can't find this article now.
I genuinely worry that US corporations make so much money from outside of USA that the American bargain doesn't work anymore. That these CEOs will actively work against the American reboot. We're seeing it today with Trump and his elk visiting China in the hopes of doing business there.
To fix this procurement crisis, America needs to retool and that's simply not possible in the way of China because of population and financial issues. Instead, an allied network needs to be used. However, we're seeing dismantling of alliances instead.
“debating the next PDA recipient while the Tomahawk production line still can’t hit triple digits annually.”
Given what is happening (with US politics, the obvious risk to getting weapons from the US being held hostage to the whims of a president, the now clear strategic need to diversify away from any single US point of failure) in the future what reasonable country planning ahead would put themselves in a situation to be a PDA recipient? Who could trust the US to actually deliver when needed?
Good article. Probably another point to discuss on what the cost is to the US for that Tomahawk production line, when the rest of the allied defense procurement takes a look at the new risks to buying American items.
The only reason you need to worry about your weapons stock levels is that you are allergic to minding your own business and no longer recognise the rights of sovereign nations to live freely within their own borders. You have this mental aberration and share it with the other fascist states of Russia and Israel.
Your joint attacks on the global populations rights to live and think as they choose have led once again to an arms race, only this time you are building the wrong arms for the century your provoked wars are taking place in.
Europe and China will win this new arms race because we have zero interest in attacking each other.
Ukraine has been given 39 ATACMS missiles, US Army fired 414 ATACMS missiles at Iraq in 2003. Ukraine has not received a single Tomahawk missiles, US Navy fired 802 Tomahawk missiles at Iraq in April-March 2003.
All those missiles were fired within 20 days then. At Iraq who never threatened or attacked USA, Canada, Europe, or any American allies in the Middle East.
If Kyiv falls, be sure to see Moscow (1) station nukes in western Ukraine and (2) will draft a million men from Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova into the Z-orcs army stationed on the Polish, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
David Sacks and Mike Lee were Putin's personal nuclear terrorists with one goal: deprive Ukraine of defences.
Really great article and really great rebuttal of a horseshit argument from Responsible Statecraft. The only real problem here is that you are arguing with political hacks who have absolutely zero interest in listening to reason. They're there to push a partisan political position, not to openly and honestly debate the real nuances of foreign policy and military procurement processes.
As a man who has spent his entire adult life in the business of developing, manufacturing and selling munitions to the DOD, I can promise you that Joe Biden, for whatever else his faults may have been, did not "give away the farm"; that farm was long gone even when I first entered the defense industry back in 1999 😁.
I skimmed so I may have missed it: the bulk of what was sent to Ukraine was too old for DOD to use. Using Ukraine as the disposal mechanism likely created significant savings on the various obsolete systems shipped.
Yes. Let's keep in mind that nukes too have a peremption date. Something like "use best before" stamp. Ouch...
This article seems right on, Wes!
Is this part of the reason the Pentagon won’t allow or can’t pass an independent audit?
Where has the $$ gone?
The US has been involved or has instigated war after war, and people on the top or in the know have gotten rich.
Am I reading and coming to inaccurate conclusions?
Hi Tina, the Pentagon's audit failures are genuinely scandalous and worth being angry about. The DoD has failed to pass a clean audit every single year since the audit requirement was mandated by Congress in 1990. To me, it represents a serious accountability gap in how taxpayer money gets tracked through one of the world's largest bureaucracies.
Personally, I think the audit failures are mostly a story about decades of incompatible accounting systems, siloed databases, and a bureaucratic culture that never prioritized financial transparency, not necessarily a coordinated skimming operation. But defense contractors absolutely profit from war, and the revolving door between the Pentagon and the defense industry is insane.
Ok thanks, I needed to see the situation through your more experienced eyes.
100%
I hope this is read far and wide.
I wrote, three or four years ago, that the number one priority after arming Ukraine was rebuilding the factories.
Some have been built, mostly by the Ukrainians and the Germans, but others are lagging, including Norway's Nammo and Kongsberg Defence (the latter makes the NASAMS anti air missile - both are waiting for investment and electricity allotment, no kidding ), and Chemring Nobel who still don't even have planning permission for their new explosives factory.
The Americans are expanding far too slowly as well, Ukraine, Tűrkiye and China are cornering the cheap and good enough drone space.
Thank you for writing this piece, Wes! You are absolutely correct! Biden arming Ukraine didn't cause the problem we currently face! To insinuate it did is using slanted logic.
Our country is much less safe and we need to get off our behind and fix it. Using this faulty logic, one could just as easily write a piece arguing that the Iran war was the cause of the problem because we used up all of our high value ammunitions like Patriot and Tomahawk missiles, etc. in an illegal war!
You hit the nail right on the head! We did it to ourselves! Now we have to reap the whirlwind! We need to replenish our weapons. it's just that simple! Pointing Fingers for political gain is not going to do it!
Good job Wes! Keep up the good work please!
Your perspective is a clear statement and analysis of what has been plainly apparent to a blind man at least since 2014. We have become the pre-War German Army and German arms industry (not at the same scale but with the same mindset). Let's build the most awesome tanks in the history of tanks, arm them to the teeth, armor them against everything but a lightning strike from Zeus, and, oh, by the way, let's build them like Swiss watches, one neat tank at a time. And let's make them hard to maintain, and fuel hogs, and let's use highly specialized, technically advanced ammunition. Should be fine.
*A few moments later* The Americans were turning out inferior tanks at the rate of 300 per day on assembly lines and swarming battlefields with half-assed tanks *Ha ha haaa!* except that swarms of mediocre tanks beat the hell out of one Swiss Army Tank, Tiger or not. Like swarms of drones.
The Iranians shot up a few of our most advanced aircraft on the ground with a handful of kites with gas motors and props carrying hand grenades. (This last bit was particularly galling because it was so reminiscent of Admiral Kimmel's and General Short's [both came up short, just like the best and brightest in the Iran fiasco] parking all the big boats and bombers in nice straight lines for security from theoretical, local, Japanese provocateurs.
It's as though our arms procurement mavens, and their industrial enablers, look at the current battlefield and say, "Oh, that's precious. Anyway, let's build a new drone that costs $25 million and can read a license plate from 30,000 feet. And let's build 20 of them." Should be fine.
Our MO is to wait until we're under immediate and direct attack across a broad front before we throw out the budget, order our industries to build anything that flies and explodes, suspend the procurement rules, and unleash the dogs of war. The situation I describe is what the AAF did in 1940. Congress told Hap Arnold, "Here's a billion dollars. Build an Air Force." There was no formal budget of any kind for the AAF's X Program until 1944 for the 1945 fiscal year when it became abundantly clear we would win the War.
We haven't gotten serious yet. Neither has Europe. Or the Commonwealth. Or anyone else, except Ukraine and Russia. So frustrating. Thanks for your excellent analysis. Slava Ukraine.
Ukraine has been given 39 ATACMS missiles, US Army fired 414 ATACMS missiles at Iraq in 2003. Ukraine has not received a single Tomahawk missiles, US Navy fired 802 Tomahawk missiles at Iraq in April-March 2003.
All those missiles were fired within 20 days then. At Iraq who never threatened or attacked USA, Canada, Europe, or any American allies in the Middle East.
If Kyiv falls, be sure to see Moscow (1) station nukes in western Ukraine and (2) will draft a million men from Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova into the Z-orcs army stationed on the Polish, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
---
David Sacks and Mike Lee were Putin's personal nuclear terrorists with one goal: deprive Ukraine of defences.
---
D. Trump proposed uniting the US, China, and Russia against the International Criminal Court in The Hague. www.ft.com/content/567c57b0-6346-43e6-9d14-840a793b4d1d
The "cost" of the Ukraine war depends on how you value stuff we pulled out of inventory that we were never, ever going to use again ourselves. Replacement cost? Original cost? Scrap value? I'm tending towards scrap value for a lot of it. In which case the cost of the war to the U.S. is, practically speaking, even lower.
On the concept of "Scrap Value": Some of that stuff couldn't have simply been scrapped out. It would have had to be decommissioned at additional cost to taxpayers. At least we got to see it blown up against an invading Russian army.
I explained my accounting poorly. To me, "scrap value" is what you finally get after all those costs.
Jus wanted to make sure those out of industry / accounting grasped those costs.
There is a historical detail that has led the US to the loss of manufacturing capacity that has never been mentioned. The Defence Production Act was enacted to maintain production and the readiness state of the US Military. About the time of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, or before that, the requirement to be able to reconstitute war time production in 120 days was dropped. That was the start of the end of US manufacturing. Or my memory of the information is getting fuzzy with age, but the outcome was that the US’s manufacturing ability even by 1980 was finished.
Former industrial parks where there were hundreds of factories cheek by jowl were abandoned, rusted and being demolished. Around Chicago, Detroit, and many other places the bells were tolling for the assembly lines, ship yards, foundries, machine shops and the jobs. The corporations had a free hand to move manufacturing the cheapest labour pools they could find: Mexico, then China, then Vietnam, etc…
The upshot is that business people are strategically myopic at best, and willfully ignorant at worst. They should not be running government’s strategy for defence or war.
European manufacturers have not seen quite the decimation, so for them to rebuild will be somewhat easier.
I will push back a little bit, the lack of manufacturing capacity lands squarely on Congress and the Presidents. Industry will not build or maintain capacity if is not paid for.
Good point, James
Thank you for what you. Sometimes you kinda get in the weeds, it is always interesting.
Yep. Surge capacity was a part of the supplier agreements at any good company I worked for. We'd try for 55/35/10 percent distribution with 3 suppliers. Each knew where they stood and had the opportunity to grow, shrink, or leave. Each supplier agreement included required planning for what they would do if we suddenly increased, or decreased, our demand. Consider a decrease in our order putting a supplier on the rocks; Thirty-five percent reduced to 10% and they go out of business (suddenly to 0%) would be a real shock. Enough to bring major lines to a grinding halt.
The war goods industry seems designed to make a ton of money for the suppliers and their stockholders and only secondarily "provide for the common defense". Well they made particular importance of the making money part and seem to have left the common defense part in the ditch.
By God, Wes, this column belongs on the front page of the NYT and WSJ.
Great piece, but what is unsaid is that it makes perfect sense if you are on team democracy. If you are trying to defend democracy and the rule of law in the United States and throughout the world, then the return was incredible. If you are trying to end democracy in the United States, and anywhere in the world — because democracy anywhere is a threat to despots, and aspiring despots, everywhere — like Trump and the party in his image, then what you say makes no sense at all. Why would you arm your enemy against your ally despot, Putin. And this is the true motivation of Mike Lee and his follower.
Another important point is that we will never be able to compete with China in mass arms production. They have four times the population, and are rapidly approaching us in GDP per capita. And in scientific and technological advancement, if we keep lurching backward towards the dark ages, they will quickly exceed us there too. Where we can beat the Chinese is if all of the world’s advanced democracies unite. Together, we have a comparable population and much more wealth and technology.
But Trump is a hideous excuse for a human being whose word means nothing. He has no true friends, and his party has been formed in his image. And, of course, they are on the other side of democracy.
Kasparov made an argument a while back that what makes America great is it's ability to reboot when faced with problems. I still believe that America can reboot and save her ideals.
I read an article a while back about CEOs in the 60s believing in the capitalist ideal. By this I mean competition and fair wages for the working class. Sadly, I can't find this article now.
I genuinely worry that US corporations make so much money from outside of USA that the American bargain doesn't work anymore. That these CEOs will actively work against the American reboot. We're seeing it today with Trump and his elk visiting China in the hopes of doing business there.
To fix this procurement crisis, America needs to retool and that's simply not possible in the way of China because of population and financial issues. Instead, an allied network needs to be used. However, we're seeing dismantling of alliances instead.
Honestly not sure what's going to happen.
“debating the next PDA recipient while the Tomahawk production line still can’t hit triple digits annually.”
Given what is happening (with US politics, the obvious risk to getting weapons from the US being held hostage to the whims of a president, the now clear strategic need to diversify away from any single US point of failure) in the future what reasonable country planning ahead would put themselves in a situation to be a PDA recipient? Who could trust the US to actually deliver when needed?
Good article. Probably another point to discuss on what the cost is to the US for that Tomahawk production line, when the rest of the allied defense procurement takes a look at the new risks to buying American items.
The only reason you need to worry about your weapons stock levels is that you are allergic to minding your own business and no longer recognise the rights of sovereign nations to live freely within their own borders. You have this mental aberration and share it with the other fascist states of Russia and Israel.
Your joint attacks on the global populations rights to live and think as they choose have led once again to an arms race, only this time you are building the wrong arms for the century your provoked wars are taking place in.
Europe and China will win this new arms race because we have zero interest in attacking each other.
Ukraine has been given 39 ATACMS missiles, US Army fired 414 ATACMS missiles at Iraq in 2003. Ukraine has not received a single Tomahawk missiles, US Navy fired 802 Tomahawk missiles at Iraq in April-March 2003.
All those missiles were fired within 20 days then. At Iraq who never threatened or attacked USA, Canada, Europe, or any American allies in the Middle East.
If Kyiv falls, be sure to see Moscow (1) station nukes in western Ukraine and (2) will draft a million men from Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova into the Z-orcs army stationed on the Polish, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
David Sacks and Mike Lee were Putin's personal nuclear terrorists with one goal: deprive Ukraine of defences.
D. Trump proposed uniting the US, China, and Russia against the International Criminal Court in The Hague. www.ft.com/content/567c57b0-6346-43e6-9d14-840a793b4d1d